Montanaro’s site-specific intervention, Standing (with Grey Area) will reorganize expectations for experiencing a Museum gallery and its contents, based on the transformation of existing Museum furniture and resources. Translating cues from the news, the artist will block entrances, move benches and mediate the viewing of art through reproductions and modified spaces, rendering primary content in the Museum as contingent. This work explores the discrepancies between sources and how something like the simple act of standing can compress different ideas and places.

Jamilah Abdul-Sabur

Abdul-Sabur has cast words and phrases in various materials such as iron, resin, sand, salt, bronze, aluminum, asphalt and ash, in order to contemplate the function, meaning and usage of language. Her work explores the ways in which meaning can be constructed and destroyed through their physical transformation, manipulation, and repetition. By transforming words into objects, the artist is able to analyze their possible logic and meaning in a tactile way, and to manipulate the words abstractly in "four dimensions," as she says, "-how hard, how big, how fast, how far." In the piece After Charles Bowden, 2010, a 12’ x 8’ routed plywood wall protrudes from a supporting wall by 4ft. The shadows, of the routed text marked by the light, give a sense of displacement. The text reads: Now everywhere is a line and crossing these lines grows harder and the lines themselves leap magically upward and become walls and razor wire and bullets and cells, absolute. The appropriated text is by author and journalist Charles Bowden, who writes about issues of migration along U.S./Mexico border.

Adbul-Sabur's second piece at the Salon, Untitled, is a four hour performance which explores how communication is filtered by the media. The artist will lie in a hospital bed, watching an interview with journalists that reveal the cover-up of the CIA's involvement in Jamaican politics during the 1970s. This work takes, as a starting point, the horrific fire at Myer's Ward in 1980, which killed 153 elderly women and was thought to be a part of the months-long, violent lead-up to some of the most tumultuous elections in Jamaica's history.

Art-Making

Join Museum Educator Lucy Eron for a printmaking workshop that is sure to be fun for all ages and skill levels.

Allison Cobb

Cobb will read from her work in progress, The Autobiography of Plastic. For this work, the author is tracing the journey of a single piece of plastic that probably came from the Consolidated factory in San Diego during WWII. It was stamped VP-101, the name of a WWII PBY squadron. It turned up on Midway Island in 2004, inside the belly of a dead albatross chick. As more plastic pollution enters the ocean, this is becoming a common phenomenon: One study says 40% of albatross chicks die from swallowing plastic, Cobb says.

“We can read such statistics, but we may not really feel their full meaning,” she notes, “unless we can understand about a single piece of plastic and the lives it passed through.” In this case, they include the factory workers in San Diego, the young Navy pilot who survived being shot down by the Japanese but lost his plane, and the wildlife photographer who removed every piece of plastic – more than 500 in all – from the albatross chick she had been photographing only the day before. “I hope,” says Cobb, “that by uncovering such traces I can show that the autobiography of plastic is really the autobiography of all of us.”

Support for Summer Salon Series 2012: Beyond the Banner, provided by Wells Fargo, Mr. Brent V. Woods and Dr. Laurie C. Mitchell, the Museum’s Contemporary Arts Committee, the Members of The San Diego Museum of Art, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program. Institutional support for the Museum is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. Curated by The San Diego Museum of Art and agitprop.